Emotional And Sustainable Design: A Two-Phase Approach to Designing Emotionally Engaging and Sustainable Cars

The relationship between a car’s design and its environmental impact is a key aspect of the concept of style and sustainability. This study investigates how thoughtful design can promote emotional connections while integrating sustainable principles. The paper introduces a two-phase approach to understanding this relationship. In the first phase, user perceptions of car characteristics are analyzed to identify what are termed sustainable characteristics. This phase serves as a foundation, ensuring that design elements align with actual user preferences and emotional responses. The second phase focuses on translating these findings into design principles that balance sustainability with emotional engagement, aiming to create designs that are both environmentally responsible and emotionally appealing. Our findings demonstrate a strong connection between specific emotional responses—such as kindness, simplicity, elegance, and joy—and design features like minimalist aesthetics, simple, rounded shapes, compact forms that enhance energy efficiency, predominantly white color schemes with subtle monochromatic accents, and small touches of natural color. Additionally, the findings suggest that designs with reduced proportions, offering a more human scale, contribute to a sense of lightness and usability. Notably, young users place significant emphasis on both emotional engagement and sustainability in car design.